Ann Rule began volunteering at the Suicide Crisis Center after her brother committed suicide. She felt guilty about her death and she wanted to do something to help suicidal people. She answered the phone at night and until the wee hours of the morning. There were only two people on the night shift, her and a polite, kind, empathetic young man who talked people out of suicide. His name was Ted Bundy, probably the worst serial killer in American history.
Working nights side by side, they became good friends, even though Ann Rule was 10 years older, had four children, and was married. Ted was a student at the University of Washington, a psychology major, and an honor student. During quiet nights, they shared aspects of their lives as friends do.
No one saw Ted Bundy as a threat, as a killer. What they saw was a charming, intelligent, helpful and friendly young man, universally called “handsome”.
In 1971, Ann was a 35-year-old single mother of four struggling with a divorce and an ailing husband. She had been a police officer briefly, but now she made a living writing true crime articles for magazines. When college students began disappearing at the rate of one a month, Ann Rule received a publishing contract to write an entire book about the killer of these young women. She told this to Bundy, not thinking that he might be the killer.
Bundy was a cunning predator who used different methods such as a fake leg cast, pretended he couldn’t walk, and thus got young women to help him get to his car. At that point, he would have an iron bar ready to attack them and push his unconscious body into his car, drive them to a remote location and kill them, often after raping them. Other times he picked up hitchhikers, or pretended to be a policeman, telling a woman that someone had broken into his car and to accompany him to the police station.
Some women were saved; these women took action, doubted their stories and refused to go second place, following their instinct, they were the ones who survived. Interestingly, the dogs seemed to sense that she was not a good person and made a ruckus when she tried to get through the front door. Women generally believed in his charm, in his lies. Ann Rule found it hard to believe that he was the serial killer, even when she saw his sketch of Identikit in the newspaper where she instantly recognized him as Bundy.
Bundy had several girlfriends, but he was able to compartmentalize them, so they didn’t know of each other’s existence, even when he was engaged to two different women at the same time. While he was in jail, accused of the most evil and monstrous murders, he always had one or more women who loved him, supported him, believed in his innocence. And as the years went by, he acquired groupies who fought to get into his trials, overcome with joy if he smiled at them as they sat in the front row of the courtroom.
There is no doubt that this is a fascinating story of probably the worst American serial killer of all time. He murdered “at least 100 women”. On two occasions, he committed more than one murder on the same day. The women, in most cases, disappeared as if they had been taken by an alien. A woman had to walk 100 meters to her apartment, she saw two friends on the way, the final distance she had to cover was barely 10 meters to the door of her house. She disappeared without a trace, without a sound. This was common to many of the murdered women. Many bodies were not found for months or years, many were never found. There were no clues, no one saw or heard anything. And the killer, Ted Bundy lived an exemplary life. He studied law at different universities, worked as a security guard, in a government department, volunteered for the Republican Party, was charming, kind and very persuasive.
This fact book is definitely creepy. But there are things to learn from him. In one case, two women walked up to his car at night. One went back to his flat, about 100 meters away, to retrieve a forgotten key. The other waited in the car. When the woman returned with the key, she saw a man dragging her friend away in a headlock. She let out an almighty scream, which was heard blocks away. The man, Ted Bundy, let her go and left.
There are parts of this book that are appalling, the murders, fortunately the more vile parts, like the necrophilia, aren’t fully detailed. The book is largely a biography of Bundy’s life and a short autobiography of Ann Rules’ connection to Bundy. Much of the book deals with his legal defense (he had been a law student and a psychology major) and how he used every trick he could to stay alive. He had three different death warrants waiting for him.
Ann Rule would have known Bundy better than anyone. After they broke up, they continued to remain friends, through mail and phone calls. Ann Rule was highly suspicious of the Bundy murders, but found it difficult to reconcile the Bundy she knew with the horrible murderous Bundy. This was despite the fact that she had extensive legal experience and gave seminars to police detectives on many criminal matters. She during her life has written 33 books and 1,400 articles mainly on criminal cases, so she was not naive about murderers. She followed her case through the courts, through the detectives working on the murders, and through the phone calls and letters Bundy sent her.
As time passed, she became convinced of his guilt, even as he continued to deftly deny it. In court, the evidence against her was never rock solid. There was no DNA, no fingerprints, he always wore gloves and rarely left even the slightest evidence, even the bodies were not found for months, years and in many cases never found. Her defense team managed to get some important police evidence withdrawn from the trials. But members of the public, women who escaped death, were able to identify him. The teeth marks on a woman’s body exactly matched her teeth. Hairs found on a half mask matched her hair. Weapons, a butcher knife, cast and crutches were found in her possession. The evidence was irrefutable.
It’s a fascinating book, detailing how he was eventually caught, his escape from custody twice, the failure of the criminal justice system to coordinate information from other states. Bundy killed, not just in one state, but in Washington, Oregon, Utah, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, California, and probably more. There were many similarities in these kidnappings and murders, however, each state mostly kept the information to themselves. Had the information been shared, he would have been caught years earlier.
It is not known how many women, mostly between the ages of 15 and 25, Bundy killed, but the best estimate is “at least 100”. Many bodies have never been found, dumped in remote places. In addition to this, over the years many credible witnesses have come forward to describe how Bundy stalked them or tried to kidnap them.
There are many theories about his mental state. Was he crazy? After many mental tests, the answer was always negative. The most likely description was sociopathic (psychopathic). He was normally lucid, intelligent, persuasive and charming. At times, he displayed a violent anger that frightened those who saw him. There is no consensus as to why he committed these murders, or what his mental defect was.
For ten years, Bundy argued that he was innocent, but even in his final hours after confessing to thirty murders, he did not take the blame. The blame, he said, was the pornography that warped his mind and led him to commit the murders. However, many years earlier he had written to Ann Rule saying that no one looked at these pornographic books and that he certainly had no interest in them himself.
Ted Bundy was executed in Florida in 1989.
